If you happened to crawl out from under a rock on April 1st 2011…

…no one would blame you for thinking that Google’s Gmail can be controlled by movement, Youtube is 100 years old, or that IKEA have made a high chair for dogs.

As Trendsmap shows us the interwebs were so abuzz with rumors, jokes and pranks that I’m sure even veterans of the internet had to think twice before writing off some ‘news’ as bogus… It was a crazy news day!

So, all in all, it was a good day to pretty much ignore the news completely, or from a PR perspective, maybe it was a good time to get some bad news out in the public sphere as it was likely that no one would believe you anyway!

Over that past few months we have been creating Trendsmap Twitter alerts via localised Twitter accounts. The reason we’ve done this is that we realised early on that the trends that matter the most are those that actually mean something to you.

So with this in mind we decided that we needed to have the ability to alert our Trendsmap users to events and breaking stories that were happening ‘close to home’…

Trendsmap is 1 year old today and we thought we’d use this joyous day to tell you about some of the things we’ve done recently.

Breaking Alerts

We have set up breaking alert Twitter accounts for over 100 locations around the world, with more coming soon. You can follow these to know what’s being discussed in your town right now, and some of the most popular ones include Melbourne, Toronto, Auckland, London, Johannesburg, Chicago and Mexico City. You can see the full list of accounts here.

Location pages

Our location pages (eg. New York), have a lot of detailed trending data for a city, and are often overlooked. We’ve spruced them up so you can more easily see:

We recently licensed a version of Trendsmap to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) for their coverage of the recent Australian election. We filtered purely on election based tweets, and had a timeline so trends could be viewed over time.

World Cup

We also created a version of Trendsmap for the World Cup, which proved a great way to follow the games. Below is one of the visualisations we created from it.

We have started to roll out support on Trendsmap for more languages. Some of you may have seen improvements in languages including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Dutch. For example, South America now has a much better coverage of local language trends, as well as much of Western Europe.

As part of the work to make this happen we created a global map of what languages are typically used on Twitter from these locations. Whilst it is still a work in progress, it looked so nice, we thought we would share it with you all. This was created from 3 days of sampled tweets from across the globe. Click on the image below to see the a large version of the map.

Of interest here is the red streak that spreads South-South-East from the 0,0 lat/lon point just off the West coast of Africa. It’s not clear why this is the case. Perhaps it’s due to problems some devices/clients have with their GPS units, we’ve found a new island, or even a parallel universe. Hopefully it’s not another BP oil leak…

Ignoring the non-English speaking world online means missing out on a very large, and rapidly growing portion of the internet. From the very first day we launched Trendsmap, the most common request we received was to track trends across the globe in languages other than English. It has been a little while now since we have made a significant change to Trendsmap, but we are excited to be closing in on a new release which will be the first step in achieving greater internationalisation.

Recently we did a trial in conjunction with the National TV broadcaster in the Netherlands, NOS during the recent national municipal elections there. Part of their election coverage including monitoring social media sites, including twitter, and in turn they used Trendsmap to identify local trends across the country during the election. For this to work we had to include Dutch tweets in the trends extraction, the result being a specialised version that showed Dutch & English trends from the Netherlands.

As part of the next step we are looking at including Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese on Trendsmap. Other languages would progressively follow thereafter. Also included in this beta version are a number of other enhancements including better word placement, and enhanced resolution of the map (you will be able to zoom in a bit more).

Here are some screen shots giving a good indication of the change it makes when you use tweets from the ‘local’ languages to generate trends.

This second one from our development version of the site shows the trends for the same region and time, but also using Dutch tweets to generate trends :

On a side note, if any geeky types out there happen to be heading to the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, WhereCamp in Mountain View, or Twitter’s Chirp Conference in San Francisco in the coming weeks, then please get in touch. We are heading over from Australia, and will otherwise be in San Francisco for the period, and would love to meet up whilst there.

You can stay tuned on the new features we’ll be rolling out here, but we’d totally love it if you can fan us on our new Facebook page. We’ve got 3 x $100 Threadless.com vouchers that we’re giving away. Just become a fan before 31st March to enter the draw.